Tag: technology

Some drones over US bases may have been conducting surveillance: NORTHCOM general

A senior U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) official told members of the Senate that some of the 350 drones that flew over military installations and sensitive areas last year may have been conducting surveillance.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, who is commander of NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), was questioned about the drones during a Senate Armed Services Committee Budget hearing on Thursday.

Drones were spotted flying all over the country last year, though most notably in New Jersey. They were also flying over military installations, including Joint Base Langley, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked Guillot about the threat the unmanned aircraft pose to military operations, facilities and personnel.

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Larry Ellison Pushes for AI-Powered National Data Centralization and Mass Surveillance

Oracle co-founder and the company’s executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison is trying to persuade governments to descend deep into AI-powered surveillance dystopia by centralizing the entirety of their national data in a single place.

And when he says everything should go into this “unified” database, Ellison means everything. That includes health-related data, such as diagnostic and genomic information, electronic health records, DNA, data on agriculture, climate, utility infrastructure…

Once in there, it would be used to train AI models, such as those developed by Oracle – Ellison shared with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair during a panel at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

As for why any government would do such a thing – his “sell” is that it would allow AI to be used to provide better services. But this time, he left out how this centralization would also represent an exceptional opportunity to “turbocharge” mass government surveillance, even though there is little doubt that many governments are hearing him loud and clear on that point as well.

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High-Explosive Drone Pierces Shell Of Chernobyl Nuclear Plant At Very Moment Trump Pushes Ukraine Toward Peace

On Friday just prior to high-level meetings among Western security officials and Ukrainian leadership commencing in Munich, including US Vice President J.D. Vance and Zelensky, there was a dangerous incident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine’s Kyiv oblast.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky accused Russia of launching a drone equipped with a high-explosive warhead at the historic, defunct power plant, site of the April 1986 nuclear disaster and meltdown. The drone reportedly hit the protective containment shell of the Chernobyl plant.

Zelensky’s office released footage showing an impact to the giant concrete and steel shield protecting the remains of the nuclear reactor. BBC writes that “The shield is designed to prevent further radioactive material leaking out over the next century. It measures 275m (900ft) wide and 108m (354ft) tall and cost $1.6bn (£1.3bn) to construct.”

And WaPo details further of the looming potential dangers:

In 2019, construction was completed on the New Safe Confinement — a $1.7 billion arch-shaped steel structure, which would contain the destroyed reactor. The site still contained some “200 tons of highly radioactive material,” according to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which helped finance the project.

Thus the situation is deeply alarming given the potential for a new radiation leak at the site which could impact the region, or even Europe. An IAEA team on the ground said it heard an explosion at around 01:50 local time coming from the New Safe Confinement (NSC) shelter. Photos showed flames at the top of the huge structure.

The UN agency is on high alert, but issued a statement saying the drone strike did not breach the plant’s inner containment shell. The IAEA also did not attribute blame, not identifying who sent the drone.

The Kremlin strongly rejected that it was behind the incident:

“There is no talk about strikes on nuclear infrastructure, nuclear energy facilities, any such claim isn’t true, our military doesn’t do that,” Peskov told reporters in a call.

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The Secret History of American Surveillance

From cellphone spying to facial scanning technology to massive data farms, it’s no secret that the U.S. government is gathering loads of personal information on its citizens.

But few remember the origins of our modern surveillance state. Some argue that it was forged over 115 years ago, half a world away in the Philippine Islands.

The story begins in the mid-1870s, when a technological renaissance catapulted America into its first information revolution. Thomas Edison’s quadruplex telegraph and Philo Remington’s typewriter allowed data to be recorded accurately and transmitted quickly. Inventions such as the electrical tabulating machine and the Dewey Decimal System could count, catalog and retrieve huge amounts of information efficiently. Photography was becoming widely accessible, thanks to George Eastman’s roll film, and biometric criminal identification systems such as fingerprinting were adopted from Europe. Our ability to manage, store and transmit data grew by leaps and bounds.

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The world’s worst financial catastrophe could happen soon

Today, there are developers around the world working on creating artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can autonomously do millions of useful things, like book airline tickets, dispute credit card charges, and even trade crypto. One AI, called Truth Terminal, has recently made the news by becoming the first AI millionaire by promoting crypto currencies it was gifted. While not fully autonomous yet, it’s quite likely by later this year, some AI agents — not dissimilar from viruses — will be able to independently wander the internet, causing significant change in the real world.

I’m all for AI and what it can do for humanity, but what happens when a programmer purposely and permanently withdraws his access to control an AI bot? Even rudimentary AIs could potentially cause havoc. But one type of AI agent in particular is being increasingly discussed in financial circles — autonomous AIs designed solely to make money.

Entrepreneurs like myself are worried this particular AI could have huge ramifications for the financial world. Let’s examine one wild scenario — which I call the AI Monetary Hegemony — something that could possibly already happen in 2025.

A fully autonomous AI agent is programmed to go on to the internet and create cryptocurrency wallets, then create crypto currencies, then endlessly create millions of similar versions of itself that want to trade that crypto.

Now let’s assume all these AIs are programmed to try to indefinitely increase the value of their crypto, something they accomplish in similar ways humans do — by promotion and then trading their cryptos for higher values. Additionally, the autonomous AIs open their crypto to be traded with humans, creating a functioning market on the blockchain for all.

This plan sounds beneficial for all parties, even if people decry that the AI created-crypto currencies are essentially just Ponzi schemes. But they’re not Ponzi schemes because there is an endless supply of AIs always newly appearing to buy and trade more crypto.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize the AIs endlessly replicating and acting like this could quickly amass far more digital wealth than all humanity possesses.

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Why Government Computers Are Such a Mess

Every so often, I get reminded that I’m old, and I’ve been programming for almost 60 years, which is a long time. But 60 years in the business means I’ve seen a lot of things that young naïve programmers have never seen.

This comes up often when people talk about DOGE and the Wizards Academy Musk has put together to help investigate fraud, abuse, and, probably most of all, bureaucratic stupidity.

One of the things I see people — technical people, but young — saying about things like Social Security and the IRS is things like “just dump the whole database into Hadoop.”

The problem with that starts with the fact that it’s not in a database. It’s a wildly heterogeneous collection of different databases, ISAM files, and card images, and I would bet money that a lot of it is on old 7-track tapes. Some of these are probably stored in Iron Mountain or a similar installation. Also, some of the data may still be just on paper, as, apparently, government retirement records are.

So what Big Balls and the other wizards are going to need to do to start with is find the data. 

I’m willing to bet there’s no single catalog of all the data sets. Having found the data, much of it is card images that almost certainly are only documented by COBOL copybooks. (Back in 2020, I wrote about COBOL for the Stack Overflow Blog when it suddenly became trendy as some of these systems desperately needed to be maintained.)

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A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers – Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego – to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.

For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.

The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

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Breakthrough as Oxford scientists say they’ve achieved teleportation

Scientist claim they achieved a massive breakthrough in teleportation by beaming data between quantum computers.

Researchers at the University of Oxford successfully teleported logical gates – the basic components of a computer algorithm – between two quantum processors separated by more than six feet.

Using particles of light (or photons), the scientists were able to form a shared quantum link between the two separate devices. 

This allowed two processors to work remotely, sharing the same algorithm to complete their computing tasks.

The breakthrough may solve the ‘scalability problem’ that has plagued the construction of usable quantum computers.

Currently, however, a single computer capable of processing millions of qubits would need to be gigantic in size – making them impossible for most people to have. 

Qubits (or quantum bits) replace the traditional bits of a standard computer. 

The new breakthrough changes all that, allowing scientists to move data between a series of smaller devices – instead of building one enormous machine.

The team explains that any quantum device powerful enough to be a game-changing innovation in computer science would need to be able to process millions of qubits. 

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Group of Investors Led by Elon Musk Make a $97.4 BILLION Bid for OpenAI

On the one hand, tech billionaire Elon Musk heads an incredible array of companies such as electric car maker Tesla, space exploration giant SpaceX, satellite compoany Starlink, social media platform X and Artificial Intelligence xAI, among others.

Any one of those companies above could be enough to fill an ordinary man’s life. But, as we know, the richest man in the planet, Musk, is far from it.

But on the other hand, he’s also leading a veritable revolution with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), implementing President Donald J. Trump’s policies at a titanic pace, having shaken DC and the deep state to a level that we could only imagine before it really started happening.

So, one could assume that NOW, Musk would have enough on his plate – perhaps even more than enough.

But no, we know learn that a consortium of investors led by Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

This is widely seen as an escalation in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind the popular AI-bot ChatGPT.

Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, has revealed that he submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board of directors today (10).

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Secret Service Shot Down Drone above Trump Motorcade during Election Campaign

President Trump’s Secret Service detail were forced to shoot down a drone during the election campaign, according to a new book.

Reporter Alex Isenstadt says that while on campaign in Pennsylvania—where Trump was almost assassinated by a gunman—a drone began following the Trump motorcade, prompting a Secret Service agent to shoot it down with an electromagnetic weapon.

The Trump campaign was particularly concerned by threats to his life from the Iranian regime, which has vowed revenge against the President since the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, during Trump’s first term in office.

Isenstadt says that Trump was warned of threats to his private jet “Trump Force One” from Iranian operatives armed with surface-to-air missiles. It was worried the plane would be particularly vulnerable during takeoff and landing.

The book claims that Trump travelled on a decoy plane provided by businessman Steve Witkoff, who has since been named Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. Trump was playing golf with Steve Witkoff in West Palm Beach when a second attempt was made on his life by Ryan Routh, who is due to face trial for the attempt, in September.

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